1 Comments:

Yes, indeed, this is extremely serious. Even before ClimateGate, many corrupt politicians started to mention the f***ing 'Net ought to get closed.

Recent proposed legislation would (is still) endangering what is called "Web 2.0", i.e. the social networks where individuals are able to broadcast their views to the whole of the population and where spontaneous organisation happens.

In the early days of the inter-Net came an attempt by the US gov't to try to limit the access to encryption, the case against Phil Zimmerman, the creator of PGP is well know. They also imposed to telcos what amount to a real time full monitoring capability of the whole telephone system. But these were the days of Web 1.0 where websites were not dynamic and publicly updatable (like Blogs, Twitter, MySpace and Facebook). Websites were essentially static entities, controlled by one very identifiable entity (the owner of the web site). Under such system, novel ideas possibly deemed subversive by the power that is were limited to the boldness of the website owner who did not want to see himself shut down.

Comes Web 2.0, everyone and their neighboors can publish their opinions. Parallelly to this, file sharing hacked into the media company profits. This lead to a lot of disruption in the conventional media business, including journalism and publications.

In the mid-nineties, one argument about the "necessity" to legislate over communications (the net) was "kiddie porn". Eventually, it has been shown that kiddy porn, or even underage (anything under 18 y.o.) porn was either a rarity, or a plant from gov't. The plant was fairly well known. A few years ago, there suddenly came a resurgence of kiddy porn, and people opening files that they did not expect to be pornographic in nature, or pornography of expectedly adult content were actually containing pre-pubescent girls naked. This content was coming from Eastern Europe and it defied the imagination as to why it was left in circulation as most of it came from very few and identifiable sources,and was distributed for free over Usenet (thus, how did they pay their bills, I cannot fathom).

I see the present spamming of porn into children's material as another such attempt.

This is the perfect pretext to sustain a stronghanded tactics for further regulating content on the internet.

The internet, truly an inter-network of privately owned computers connected together by a common software protocol, should not be seen as "child safe", since it is composed of private individuals all acting on their own.

The proposed legislation entailed the Internet Service Provider being responsible for the content transiting through their machines, therefore forcing them into the role of snitches or thought police.

The most disturbing aspect of the above spamming is the risk that such obscene acts will provide a simplissistic yet morally effective sanction to statist restriction on freedom of speech, and ultimately, on freedom of though.

If this legislation gets implemented, Web 2.0 will be deeply disrupted, as the reposting of "copyrighted" content, associated with a warn and takedown provision forcing the ISPs to take down news only on presumption of violation of copyrights, videos like the one you published showing an assembly of Obama's promises will become outlawed or choked by incessant litigation, effectively censored.

ClimageGate and the loss of credibility of our politicians is the latest and ongoing demonstration of the power of freedom of communication.

See Senator Rockefeller saying,under the disguise of "National Security" that the internet should never have existedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct9xzXUQLuY

While it is true that the internet increases risks to business, but overall, it even more increases risks to corrupt politicians and corrupt businesses.